Le Jour du fléau

The Day of the Locust takes place in one of the most bizarre settings to have ever existed in the real world. Hollywood in the 1930s was a place of grand illusions, with an incredible power to change people's lives for the better, or for the worse. The relics of that time are, for the most part, the films that were churned out on sound stages, generally very wholesome and carefree. The reality of what went on offstage is largely a mystery, although it is safe to assume it wasn't all glamor and good times. The Day of the Locust is dark historical fiction, and is utterly fascinating. It is a journey through Hollywood's golden age, guided by someone who comes to Hollywood a typical dream seeker, who finds himself helpless under the pressure of the industry and the misleading tactics of those who rule the screen. The characters that come in and out of his life are caricatures of the aspiring actresses, child stars, and crew members that help make Hollywood truly troubled and deeply strange.

I finished watching this movie half an hour ago and I am still trembling, my heart still pounding. I am a great admirer of John Schlesinger and he has been one of my favorite directors since I saw Midnight Cowboy. But this just beats it all. It is the most horrifying movie I have ever seen. I am normally not a sympathizer with human characters in movies, but the end made me CRINGE. Donald Sutherland was perfect for his role and Karen Black made me feel such hate for her. There is nothing I would change in this movie. It is perfect, and beautiful, and hit with such force that I would probably never see it again, but I will remember every detail.

It took over 35 years and the collapse of the big studio system before anyone in Hollywood, in this case Paramount, brought Nathanael West's novel The Day Of The Locust to the big screen. That climax at a Hollywood premiere is certainly not something the studios would want to show the public as a typical event.

The book is based on West's experiences while writing B pictures in Hollywood during the Thirties and some of the characters he knew. His main protagonist is William Atherton, an aspiring artist who is making a living doing set designs. That's one competitive business and he's got to go over his immediate supervisor John Hillerman's head to get his work noticed by producer Richard Dysart. Like the rest of West's characters, he's sacrificed pride a long time ago. It's his eyes that we see the other characters through.

But he's a paragon of virtue compared to starlet Karen Black who will do anything and anybody to advance her career. Atherton would love to get something going with her, but he's mindful of how amoral she's become. Her only real attachment is to her father, an ex-vaudevillian and now door to door salesman, Burgess Meredith. Even trying to do his shtick with sales doesn't gain him clients.

But the saddest one in the lot and the fellow with the best performance is Donald Sutherland who is an outsider to the film people, a businessman named Homer Simpson who Black uses and abuses. Sutherland's performance is not too different from the hapless cartoon character. Imagine the cartoon Homer Simpson dealing with real life heartbreak and you've got Sutherland's character. The line between tragedy and comedy can be a very thin one.

Geraldine Page has a brief role as an Aimee Semple McPherson like evangelist, shamelessly bilking the Depression's downtrodden. She's great in the part as is Jackie Earle Haley, a really rotten child star of whom I'd love to know who West's model was.

The Day Of The Locust was directed by John Schlesinger who got an Oscar for The Midnight Cowboy. Like that film, The Day Of The Locust deals with some fringe people just trying to get by. Burgess Meredith got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor and the film also got a nomination for Costume Design.

Before Newton Minow referred to television as a vast wasteland. I think that's what Nathanael West had in mind in writing about his experiences in the movie capital. I'd recommend seeing the film to see how well Schlesinger put West's vision across.

Critically much maligned but really rather an outstanding screen adaptation of Nathanael West's 'difficult' novel about Hollywood in the 1930's and based on West's own experiences there as a 'hack' writer. The British director John Schlesinger helmed the picture, bringing much the same jaundiced eye to bear on proceedings as he did in "Midnight Cowboy". Waldo Salt wrote the excellent script and the outstanding cast included Karen Black as the wannabe actress trying to make it big in the movies, Burgess Meredith as her drunken father, William Atherton as the young art director in love with her and Donald Sutherland as the sad and lonely Homer Simpson that Black all but destroys and whose presence instigates the films tragic ending. The great Conrad Hall photographed the picture and the monstrous child is Jackie Earle Haley.

For many years John Schlesinger's "Day of the Locust" was *that* movie with a character named Homer Simpson and that earned Burgess Meredith his first Oscar nomination one year before his second one for "Rocky". Apart from that if you told me the film was really about an apocalyptic invasion of grasshoppers, I would have believed you.

Simply said, "The Day of the Locust" is like a giant hallucination put into screen, certainly one of the most bizarre pieces of film-making of the 70s adapted from a 1939 novel by Nathaniel West about a certain moral degradation of America incarnated by Hollywood and its cohorts of delusional outcasts at the eve of World War II. Like the decadent Roman Empire before its downfall, or a modern Sodoma whose daily sunshine provides the illusion of a heaven in what might be the most hellish place to be.

This is a place indeed where people are so self-centered they let automatic sprinklers do the job, turning in mechanical nonchalance all day long in a way that mirrors their own monotonous routine, where the dregs of a falling society gather to fulfill some crazy dreams to make up for the broken ones, an existential dumping ground. In these Great Depression days, Los Angeles was an oasis for the Okies or wannabe starlets, the Mecca of cinema, the one industry that didn't suffer the crisis and yet the uncompromising portrait painted by Schlesinger is as gloomy and depressing as a close-up on a Goya painting.

It's hard to reduce "Locust" to a plot, this is more a series of dispatched events that involve different characters who meet together, interact, kiss, make love, express themselves to their most pathetic, authentic and awkward way and leave us viewers with interrogations we try to reassemble like pieces of a big nightmarish picture.

William Atherton who wasn't yet the cool-to-hate jerk of his 80s roles plays a handsome and ambitious set designer, assigned to storyboard a movie about the battle of Waterloo, which foreshadows a lot when you think about it. He picks a little bungalow called the 'Earthquake' one for the still non-repaired cracks on the wall and meets his neighbor, a poor man's Jean Harlow named Faye Greener and played by Karen Black; the first thing she sees in Todd is that he hasn't a car, she's the kind of woman who wouldn't pick any man but one that can make her feel important or with enough money to provide the illusion of luxury. She wants to make it big in Hollywood, whatever she lacks in acting, she makes up in pretension.

Her father Harry is a con-artist played by Meredith; every morning he visits houses, dancing and playing his little shtick to sell an elixir, he elicits a few smiles first but once the bottle shows up, exasperation ensues and doors are closed on his face. His performance (truly Oscar-worthy) says one thing: people can handle the oddest things but they're exiled in that very place for taking, not giving. There's something in his eyes filled with sorrow and lucidity, but he's got to stick to his routine, without it, he better be dead.

Speaking for giving, there's still a man who manages to be an outcast among the outcasts, Donald Sutherland is so heart-breaking as a meek accountant full of repressed feelings, that I didn't even laugh when he introduced himself. He accepts to sponsor Faye, chaperoning her so she can fulfill her dream, but it's a foregone conclusion that she will cheat on him, at least Tod had the merit of being rejected. What Faye sees in Homer is perhaps the fact that he sees something in her, he satisfies her narcissism and that's a good alternative for love.

There are other bizarre people who populate that pit of repulsiveness: an aggressive macho dwarf (Abe Kushish), an androgynous child, a religious bigot (Geraldine Page), the gallery is made of people who're all so genuinely insane that the closest to that implausible world is either a madhouse or hell... or maybe in a place where dreams are sold in form of movies, the human leftovers build their own reality through their delusion, a sort of isolation from the norm that turns L. A. into a purgatory. And at the end it all implodes in the way of a climax that is so brutally conceived, so graphic that the fact that the novel was written in 1939 takes its full meaning. But let's not overthink it, we're talking about the film.

When it ended, I kept scratching my head... would I watch it again? I don't think so. Is it a bad film? Far from it. Well acted? Certainly one of the best performances from Sutherland. Too many bizarre people? That was the year "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" won the Oscar. So what went wrong? Nothing, the film was a vision, had a vision, was based on a vision and not all the visions are promised to posterity, and maybe not the most nightmarish ones. I enjoyed the film to the degree that it kept hooking me from beginning to end but so did a masterpiece like "Freaks" and it wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's very telling that one year after, Schlesinger made a standard thriller with "Marathon Man", as if himself too had to get "Locust" off his head, as if that was the kind of creation you can't emerge totally unscathed from it. A strange film really that I'm in no hurry to watch it again... but I'm glad I did... for the performances of Meredith and Sutherland and for the relevance of the story.

One could certainly remake the novel and adapt it to our social-network era and the poisoning narcissism Internet generated... it so happens that yesterday I had the thought that our world was screwed, if anything, one should make a "Day of the Locust" for the 2020s.